The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  The lantern blinks out as Judy watches the woman fall to her hands and knees, snatching at the scattered history. In the dark, she hears the scratching of her fingernails against the floorboards, and then the opening and closing of the door.

  When Sladja is gone, Judy looks out the window for Romeo and sees nothing but the black and reaching trees. Neither ever comes again.

  * * *

  —

  Two more days pass and the bread is gone and Judy thirsts the way a fire burns. And then on the third evening, as rain drums against the roof, the door opens on the last person she guessed would walk through it.

  “Eban,” she says, and his name, the first word she’s spoken in weeks, scours her parched throat.

  She sees he has been sent to her. He carries the normal food and water ration and clean white pot. He avoids her eyes as he does the work of laying it out, and she means to wait until he is gone to devour it all, but her legs seem to carry her to the water of their own accord, and she lets it run out the sides of her mouth and down her clothes as she drinks and drinks and drinks.

  When she has finished, she turns away to wipe her face dry. Her weakness embarrasses her.

  Knowing he won’t answer, she says his name again. And then: “Eban, I can’t have this child here.”

  He looks at the floor, arms at his side, doing nothing.

  “Are you going to stay here, when I’m gone?” He doesn’t answer. “Why? Eban, why?”

  His face is round and soft now. The daily plenty of the colony has filled out his thin figure, making him look both older and younger. He raises his head and looks at her, like he wants to show he isn’t afraid of what he sees.

  “I shouldn’t have said I would leave you,” she says softly. “That I would leave without you.”

  As they always have, his eyes undo her. “Little spider,” Daniel used to sing when she was small and full of talk and couldn’t sleep, “never still. Spins and spins and spins until…” She used to stamp her feet going up the stairs as a child; catch a mood like a cold and run endless circles around the house; lie on her back, staring at the sun, and yell till she was emptied of breath. She always had more strength than she could exhaust, more want than she could slake. Only Eban slowed what spun. When he looked her way, she saw a quiet at the centre of him that found her.

  Standing in the middle of the room now, looking ready and afraid for anything she might do, he moves her.

  Once, months and months ago, at the end of summer when the leaves were gone to red and the grass was dying, he met her coming back from the brook. They usually fetched water as a pair, or carried only two jugs at a time to fill. But for some reason she had brought all the jugs with her, without saying anything to him. She’d carried one in each hand, another in the crook of her two bent arms and the last in a small pack on her back. Her wrists ached with the weight of the two in her hands, and because of the one in her arms, she’d stumbled many times, unable to steady herself over the uneven ground with her outstretched arms. The one in the pack had come uncorked a mile from camp and soaked through every layer of clothing she wore. Still, it was a good afternoon’s work and would spare them the trip for another week.

  She was surprised to see him on the path, and he hurried to take the jugs from her, but she shook her head. It was foolish, she knew. He could help her easily, and there was nothing to be gained from carrying them the remaining way except the pride of having done something difficult and unnecessary. She waited for him to protest, but he stepped back from her and looked into her face, a radiant quiet in his pale eyes.

  “I see you,” he said softly. And then he walked by her side, just a little behind, all the way back to camp without speaking again.

  It was the day after she lost the third one.

  Now she looks at him and thinks it isn’t his fault that he became, for her, the world. In him, she saw the limits of her life. In him, she was confined. He is everything she hasn’t done, everyone she hasn’t known. He is all her choices. Too much and not nearly enough.

  Maybe, she thinks now, she couldn’t love Eban because he was the only one to love.

  The thing that is unsaid between them is too terrible to speak of. The want, the failure, the dire disappointment of it all.

  And so she says instead, “It’s about control. That’s all they built here. Not a sanctuary, not some new society. They are children who made a toy kingdom to rule. And all of it, the houses, this cell, the silence, it’s all tyranny. Whatever comforts you in this, Eban, is a lie or worse.”

  He is shaking his head and that much gives her hope. She goes on, goading him to answer her. “Out there, there are things to know, choices to make. They can’t face it. I’ve read their history. Do you understand? They’re cowardly brutes. They want to crush the world to a size they can grasp. To wield sovereignty over the tiniest possible territory.”

  She searches for some other thing to say, some way to reach him. “What do you think your mother wanted for you and your brother? Was it this?”

  His eyes narrow (I see you, she remembers) and he lifts his chin, turning his gaze from her to the door and then back again. She hears the challenge as clearly as if he’d spoken and it startles her. Why doesn’t she run? Why has she stayed in this black house, imprisoned by a dying old woman, for more days than she has managed to keep count of? When there was a chance, time and again, for her to push past whoever delivered her provisions? And maybe he’d even expected it to happen every time he came to see her, had prepared to let it happen….

  She feels the hot rush of tears, and squeezes her eyes closed against them. She can’t now imagine why she stayed here, keeping a diary of her childhood for a stranger, reading that stranger’s own account like she was assessing evidence, turning every page like it contained the possibility of truth.

  It occurs to Judy then, for the first time, that Golda gave her the key not so she could read the history but because Golda thought it would open the door and free her. And she recognizes a debt unpaid.

  “There was a man,” she says. “Eban, there was a man who was hired to look for you. It’s his job, or was. He hunts for people who’ve gone missing. People pay him to find people they’ve lost up in these hills. He had a file on you. Someone wanted to find you, Eban.”

  She steps nearer and lowers her voice. “Eban, who was looking for you?”

  Watching him, standing stricken in the same spot where he has stood without moving all this time, she thinks that there is a whole story Eban hasn’t told her. And she thinks of what she wrote in those pages for Sladja, and of what Sladja wrote. She thinks that even Josefine must have had a story none of them ever learned. And does it matter if she did? Does it make better anything any of them has done?

  As he shakes his head again, bringing his hand to his face, she hisses, “Leave the door unbolted, Eban. I can’t stay here any longer. Unbolt the door for me.”

  He turns away, walking stiffly, like one who has been struck, and leaves without answering her.

  XVI

  There is a heavy iron bell mounted on a spindle beside the fire where food is prepared and served. Every day in Heaven begins with its sour clang, calling them all from the basements of their houses. Eban’s house is the one nearest the fire, and when Oona turns the bell crank, the sound finds him in his bed under the ground like it has hunted him there.

  Since arriving at the colony, he has dreamed darkly and richly, his night dreams spilling out of bounds, entering the day, altering the world he wakes to. Every night of dreaming ends with the sounding of the bell. Judy believes he’s comforted by what he knows will happen again and again without fail, but what he feels is something greater and deeper than that. He feels love. He loves the bell the way he loves the day’s meals, the blue of sky, the changeless gravity of the earth.

  When the bell rings the next morning, he lies for a long time, staring
sightless into the dark of his narrow chamber under the ground. He leaves the lantern on the floor beside his cot unlit. The floor of his chamber is tiled with white, polished stone, and wooden planks line the walls. He sleeps on a sheet suspended by metal springs, raised inches off the ground, warmer and drier than he has slept since he came into the hills.

  When he stood before Judy last night he had to look away from the round pressure of her belly against her clothes. He doesn’t know if she noticed how her hands went to it, landing there after every gesture like a bird lighting on the ground, returning to earth. For a moment, her changed shape, the physical fact of it, made him nearly believe what he never had, insisted what he had denied: their child, its possibility.

  He can’t be sure—they are both rounder, better fed than ever before. What made hope briefly flare in his mind, like a match, could be only a few pounds of extra weight and her own will, which he believes to be a force as powerful as meiosis, as life itself. But he saw then that his doubt was unforgivable.

  So now he thinks of Judy, who stood before him last night and for a moment wanted something he could give.

  And he wonders if their child, like Judy, would look at him as if he could be seen perfectly, every crack and fissure revealed—as if, with a single breath, he could be blown apart, dissolved to dust.

  And then there’s the name he thinks and doesn’t think. He empties the name from his head, squeezes it out of every thought.

  At last he rises, unhooks the door latch and climbs up through the floor above.

  The name he doesn’t think. The thought he doesn’t name. The nameless, thoughtless thing he cannot.

  * * *

  —

  He’s the last to take his seat at the fire. He is usually the first. Beside him, Bobby-Rae rolls a twist of paper between his thumbs and forefingers, his plate already empty on the ground. He likes to have a cigarette after every meal, tamping threads of dried tobacco from the garden into papers he gets from peddlers. Eban had never seen anyone smoke before except from a pipe, and he enjoys the smell and look of it, the delicate way Bobby-Rae pinches the cigarettes between his long fingers, unspooling smoke with a wave of his hand.

  When Eban first arrived, he didn’t know how to distinguish Bobby-Rae from his brother, and thought of them almost as a single being. But now he can’t imagine mistaking one for the other. He and Bobby-Rae are usually paired for work, maintaining the houses of the colony. Eban would have preferred to be assigned to work better-suited to his skills. He doesn’t understand the construction of these elaborate houses or the complicated tools they are given to repair them. He has tried to intimate that he would be more useful as a hunter, but only Sladja leaves the colony to hunt, occasionally taking Bobby-Rae or Oona along if they are needed to help haul or field-dress a larger animal.

  But Bobby-Rae is an able worker and corrects Eban’s mistakes with impatience but not unkindness. There is a sharpness to Bobby-Rae—from his wry, jagged grin to the lithe way he moves. He laughs a great deal, but silently, with a sense of irony that bewilders Eban, unnerving him even when he understands the joke. Bobby-Rae watches the others and relishes any peculiarities in their behaviour; he often turns to smile at Eban at such moments, as if to share the humour of it. Unlike his grim-faced brother, he seems to enjoy himself, his work and his routine at the colony.

  Eban fills his bowl with the usual morning meal, a fibrous grain he can’t identify boiled to a paste, and takes his seat. As he does, Bobby-Rae nods to an empty chair Eban hadn’t noticed, blocked by Romeo, who is on his knees, tending the fire. Golda’s chair. Eban wasn’t the last to take his seat after all.

  Now that he has noticed the empty chair, he sees he’s not the only one. Oona stands at the fire, stirring her iron pot, but keeps casting her eyes over to the chair with an unhappy expression. Sladja, too, sits in stillness, her bowl in her hands, untouched, looking from Oona to the chair. She has been moody and strange for the past many days, but today she looks more anxious still. Eban has seen Sladja pass the fire on her way to Golda’s house each morning, where he knows she must unbolt the door to release her from her chamber. They never return to the fire together, but the girl always comes slinking after the older woman, never far behind.

  Now, Sladja gently touches Romeo’s shoulder, nodding at the chair, and he sets down his bowl and rises, leaving the fire to collect the missing girl. A troubling thought begins to form in Eban’s mind as he watches the man go, and then he feels the light touch of Sladja’s hand on his shoulder. She has stood to offer him the familiar tray of food and water, the clean white chamber pot. He stares at them for a moment, his head full of fearful, unspeakable questions, and then he accepts them and the task of their delivery.

  The sun has topped the hills as he reaches the black house, slanted yellow light guttering between the trees. Even now, at this early hour, its warmth reaches him, softening the air.

  He opens the door of the black house. Stepping inside, he stands and stares and wonders what he should do.

  The first time he guessed Judy was pregnant, he thought of the night he’d woken, three years old, to his mother’s screams, and then another, unfamiliar howl. How he’d crept to the bed where she slept to find the sheets soaked and red, and his mother with a stranger in her arms. How he’d begged to hold the baby she said was his brother and how she told him he couldn’t be trusted with something so weak.

  And so he was afraid for Judy’s child, and afraid of himself, who couldn’t keep it safe.

  And after she miscarried, he knows he could have made her speak, called out to her across the grief she believed was hers alone, unwound the distance between them with the right word or touch. But instead he startled himself with the limits of his will, the cold they both discovered at his heart. He was afraid to believe in that invisible speck, coiling towards existence, silently beginning and then completing, leaving no mark. He was afraid to want something so fragile. Once he dreamed of the tiny baby who had been his brother, in Judy’s arms, telling him it had died because he never spoke its name.

  But the physician in him knows he can’t be blamed for the loss of these babies—it wasn’t a failure of faith or imagination or anything else that stopped them in the womb. Some scrap of the genetic fabric in Judy or in him must be disordered. That might be it. Only that. Or maybe something in their diets. Something wrong with how they live.

  Now he stands in what he had come to think of as Judy’s house. He looks at the shattered glass, winking light up from the ground. At the sheets of paper that flap and quiver in the breeze through the broken window, a white tide across the floor.

  For no reason, he opens the door to the oubliette and peers into its darkness. He can scarcely remember the dizzy, starved days they spent down in that dark. He is surprised to feel briefly wistful, thinking of it. Of the two of them, together between those narrow walls.

  Maybe if his mother had let him hold the child. Maybe if he’d held his brother in his own child hands. Maybe then he’d have known how to want something so dangerous, something that would never be safe.

  He closes the door and then, for lack of knowing what else to do, he sets the tray of food on the table and puts the pot in the same corner where he left it when Judy was still there.

  And then he leaves the house he freed her from.

  * * *

  —

  When he returns to the fire, he knows immediately that something is wrong. The flames have been allowed to go out so only a few dim embers remain of the fire that is never cold. Even through the night, it burns.

  Now all the chairs are empty except Bobby-Rae’s. He is refilling his bowl from the pot, scraping up the last of the meal, and as he drops the pot to the ground, he glances at Eban and twists a smile. Then he turns his focus to his bowl, eating with a calm composure that Eban finds unsettling.

  And then Eban knows where the others are.
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  Golda’s house is the farthest from the fire, the first Eban and Judy encountered the night they came to this place. He can hear noise inside as he approaches, and he opens the door unsure what he will find.

  Inside, he sees first the ruined room, and then the people.

  Sladja is slamming doors and raking her hands across the bottom of every shelf and drawer. Her fury is wild and methodical as she searches for something that must be terribly important. Every stick of furniture has been overturned.

  Romeo stands in the corner of the room, ignoring Sladja. His eyes are on Oona, who kneels beside the open door in the floor. She is old and stiff, but she kneels there like a child.

  Watching Oona, Eban understands that Sladja isn’t looking for anything. He sees that the cupboards are mostly empty anyway. The things she throws to the ground are things that have been there for long years, left by whoever first built and lived in this house. Things that have no use. Things he can’t even name.

  Oona is so terribly still. When Romeo crosses the room and lays a hand on her shoulder, Eban expects her to strike him like a snake. Instead she looks back at him for a moment and nods, and Romeo leaves Golda’s house. They all know he has gone to look for her.

  He tries to remember when he left Judy. Had the moon yet risen? How many hours have passed since he shut the door, touched the bolt, hesitating, and then drew back his hand and hurried away? How long did she wait before she tried the door—and what did she expect when she put her weight against it? Did she know he’d do as he has always done, whatever she asks?